The trade of a transcendent talent that can play half the game, and change each and every facet of it in the process, netting merely a future 1st round pick and a handful of guys whose names could just as easily be replaced by those from a neighborhood petition to enforce speeding more strictly should be shocking. The Senators holding strong to their demands for a good chunk of last season and the entirety of the summer, only to turn around and flip an absolute freak of a future Hall Of Famer at the most sought after of position for a "who's who?" of San Jose's farm system should have me picking up the pieces of my jaw off the floor.

I just can't say that it does.

Look no further than the Sharks' team that just added another predator to the most dangerous of depths in their pool of defenseman getting more value out of Mike Hoffman than the team he helped make toxic in the first place for proof that the worst the NHL has to offer is just that for a reason...

Interesting condition on Karlsson trade: If he appears on the reserve list of any Eastern Conference team this season, SJ must send another first-round pick to OTT by 2022.

​Getting fleeced for Erik Karlsson might be one of the more egregious examples of organizational incompetence, but that's probably only because Marc Bergevin has run out of open beers to ask his fellow GM's to hold. Bad teams make bad trades, and it's gotten to a point where they do so with such a clear lack of shame that I can no longer, in good conscience, act surprised. Eugene Melnyk has already shown his greed by threatening to move the team, so the idea that the man who works under him chose quantity over quality is, if nothing else, extremely on-brand.

What this means for San Jose is that they will fittingly terrorize teams with the 1-2 punch of Brent Burns and Erik Karlsson, while somehow still having more than enough veteran star power up front to threaten the best the Western Conference has to offer. That said, this deal was such a no-brainer from the Sharks end that the more intriguing aspect of it sort of feels like the active brainlessness of a victim that now seems as though it was just wading in the trade waters while soaked in its own blood.